Robert Kenny

Inside Australian Culture: Legacies of Enlightenment Values

and sea-bound locale—were often intractable and engaged in a variety of resistant strategies against both their employers and the colonial officialdom. The ability of the latter to deal effectively with these class and other tensionswas hampered by divisions within their own ranks, all very evocatively described by the author. That being said, the work shares with many other sub-Antarctic and Antarctic histories a lack of engagement with contemporary historiographical developments, in particular the maritime and oceanic histories that have emerged prolifically since the 1990s. It also displays the conviction common in sub/Antarctic historiography that its subject matter is unique to the locale in which it is set. While there were some unique aspects to the Enderby settlement, it also had in common many features with other colonies of the time. Considered from the wider British imperial context, the abandonment of the colony in 1852 was not simply a unique result of its own internal collapse, but sat well within the broader trajectory of mid-nineteenthcentury British colonial policy that sought to divest itself of burdensome colonial experiments. In these and other ways the historical community will likely find The Enderby Settlement to be a very conventional narrative local history—albeit one set in a remote location. It nonetheless presents an important episode in the wider history of human engagement with the Southern Ocean islands. The author did not live to see his book in print, but it is an excellent memorial to the breadth of knowledge and passionate engagement with both history and the Southern Ocean that was one of the lifeworks of Conon Fraser.